Wild Dark Shore

Dominic Salt acts as a primary protagonist of Wild Dark Shore. He works as the caretaker and handyman on Shearwater Island. Dominic is extremely disciplined and hardworking. He is defined by his love for his children. Although this is partly his natural disposition, it is also a behavior driven by past trauma. Indeed, Dominic struggles throughout the novel with his enduring grief over a terrible decision he was forced to make. When his wife, Claire, was pregnant with Orly, it was discovered she had cancer. She decided to forego treatment so she could carry the pregnancy to term. During the birth, in accordance with her wishes, Dominic opted to save the baby’s life instead of Claire’s. The grief he feels about this decision, one that anchors the novel’s theme of the Interconnectivity of Life and Death, leads him to move his family to Shearwater Island.

Over the course of the novel, Dominic, who continues to talk to Claire throughout and keeps her belongings in his closet, learns to let go of his grief over Claire’s death, to open himself up to Rowan’s affections for him, and to loosen his control over his children’s lives so that they can have more autonomy. He begins to let go through his growing affection for Rowan, thinking, “I look at the woman who has made all of this clear to me. Who has given us this gift” (224). He recognizes that it was “wrong” of him to hoard Claire’s belongings “instead of sharing them with her children” (209).

Dominic struggles with expressing his emotions to his children. When Raff is overcome with grief, he is at a loss for words, encouraging his son instead to work out his emotions by punching a bag. When Fen struggles with the fallout from being preyed upon by Hank, he does not know how to talk to her. At the end of the novel, Dominic reflects that Rowan’s interventions “returned [his] children to [him], each one of them” (297), suggesting that he has recognized the importance of opening up about his emotions to his family.

Raff Salt is a secondary protagonist and the eldest of the Salt children. Raff is a moody, quiet 18-year-old boy. He has a learning disability and struggles with reading and schooling more generally. However, he is a gifted violinist who enjoys recording whale sounds and pairing them with his violin playing. Raff struggles with feelings of anger that he finds difficult to control. When he gets overwhelmed, he punches or breaks things, though Rowan advises him to find another emotional outlet: “This isn’t gonna work for you. You can’t just punch things […] You have to find something else” (159). Raff struggles especially to manage his emotions around the deaths of his mother and his boyfriend, Alex, as well as his ongoing inability to keep his family safe. For instance, after Fen destroys his mother’s things, Raff destroys his beloved hydrophone. After this, Raff recognizes that he needs to leave this behavior behind. By the end of the novel, as the family leaves the island, Raff chooses to leave his punching bag, resolving to use his violin as a healthier form of emotional outlet.

Fen Salt is a secondary protagonist and the middle child. She is a spirited, independent, tough 17-year-old girl who is defined by her twin loves of swimming and the seals who live on the island. She chooses to live on the beach in the boathouse rather than in the lighthouse with her family in the aftermath of a traumatic experience: She was preyed upon by the much older Hank Jones, Rowan’s husband, and when she told Hank that she thought she was pregnant, Hank attempted to drown her. Subsequently, her family locked Hank away. Her guilt and feeling of “brokenness” around this series of events, as well as Dominic’s inability to talk to her about it, lead Fen to isolate herself among the seals. Her brother, Raff, with whom she is close, observes that she is “becoming” a “wild animal […] though truthfully she has always been a bit fey, a bit other” (96). Like Dominic, Fen eventually learns to open up to Rowan about the trauma she has experienced, which helps her reunite with her family by the end of the novel.